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Monday, November 25, 2013

The city of Boston will always be a special place for Lisa Brunet and her now cancer free daughter Kayleigh...

It was, she said, “the darkest time of our lives,” and yet
it would result in memories so precious that she and her daughter would return
to Boston again and again.

On their last visit they brought two of their New York
friends with them.

“I have such a spot in my heart for this place,” Lisa Brunet
explained. “We were scared, cold people from New York, having to stay here for
three months while my daughter received her daily radiation treatments. Boston
just took us in, and I wanted our friends to see why I regard this as our
second home.”

The story began when her daughter, Kayleigh, was diagnosed
with a brain tumor at the age of 9. She would undergo two extensive surgeries
at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, but when the tumor appeared a third time Mom
was told no more could be done.

Kayleigh was only 11.

“I was told, ‘If we operate again, there’s a good chance she
won’t make it, or if she does, she won’t be the same person you know right
now.’ So we began searching for alternatives.”

Their search led to Massachusetts General Hospital, where a
radiation oncologist named Dr. Nancy Tarbell determined Kayleigh was a viable
candidate for one more trip to an operating room.

Kayleigh’s now 22 and cancer free.

“We spent those months at the Constitution Inn in
Charlestown,” Lisa recalled. “And we met a man who lived on a boat. When he
heard why we were there, he got us tickets to everything in town. When
Kayleigh’s brothers came to be with us on Christmas they ended up with
front-row seats at a Celtics game. Boston just wrapped us in its arms.”

In years to come they would take periodic “fun trips” from
their Hudson River Valley home to this place where life began anew for them a
long time ago.

That’s what brought them back this last time, when they
stayed at the Fairmont Battery Wharf with its wraparound balcony overlooking
the harbor. And that’s what they were doing when Kayleigh’s wristlet purse
slipped off and fell into the water.

She began crying: “Mom, my cellphone is in there! So are my
ID, credit cards, medication and $400 in cash.”

They noticed the Boston Fire Department had a marine
division next door, so moments later they were knocking on its doors.

“When one of them asked what brought us to Boston,” Lisa
remembers, “I told him Kayleigh’s story. I guess he must have said something to
the others because they asked for our contact information, saying they had a
dive team that conducts drills every other week.”

That was the end of the story, until Lisa’s cellphone began
ringing the next morning.

Firefighter Steve Murphy told her how diver Bob Doyle came
in on his day off; with Murphy serving as dive master, Doyle went down.

“You’re not going to believe what happened,” an excited
Murphy told Lisa. “We found it!”

The jakes wouldn’t hear of reward money, so the New Yorkers
went into the North End and returned to the station laden with pastries.

“How do you say thanks?” Lisa marveled. “Our friends were stunned,
but we told them: ‘This is what we’ve been talking about, and it’s one more
reason why we love Boston.’ ”